The Maya Image Archive is intended to host research materials provided by various scholars, such as Karl Herbert Mayer, Berthold Riese, Stephan Merk and the members of the project among others. Comprising image collections with photographs, drawings, notes and manuscripts, the Maya Image Archive allows the user to browse through the results of several decades of research trips through the entire Maya region. Forming the backbone of the Maya Image Archive, the black-and-white photo archive of Karl Herbert Mayer comprises thousands of photographs, dating from 1974 to 2006. During his numerous trips, Karl Herbert Mayer focused particularly on documenting sculpted and painted monuments with iconographic or epigraphic content. For that purpose he not only visited numerous museums and archaeological collections, but also explored the most remote archaeological sites in the Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. In the near future, the complete collection of Karl Herbert Mayer’s photographs will be made accessible to the public, enhancing and complementing the comprehensive documentation that Karl Herbert Mayer had already provided in his well known series of publications on unprovenanced Maya monuments (published 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1995) and hundreds of articles in academic journals. Moreover, the Maya Image Archive aims to be much more than a simple compilation of documents. In the database, the information attached to the documents has been organized in a coherent metadata schema with its content systematically revised and enriched in order to allow users to efficiently conduct targeted and diverse searches. Still under construction and continuously extended, the Maya Image Archive is hosted by the project Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya (TWKM) (Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan), established at the Department for the Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Arts.

Free Access

All media and information presented in the Maya Image Archive is accessable freely and without login.

The Maya Image Archive uses the web-based open source database system ConedaKOR to facilitate the administration and presentation of its research materials.

Editorial Rights

In cooperation with the Digital Research Infrastructure DARIAH-DE the database is made accessable as a DARIAH-DE Web Service via federated Login. The federated login is available for all users with a DARIAH-account.

Further, registration to the database is possible on request.

Users entering the database of the Maya Image Archive as registered user or via federated login are granted specific editorial rights. These rights include creating their own collections within the archive, and entering additional information to enrich the database.

If you have any questions about content edition, registration or federated login, please contact us.

Data and Metadata

All material of the Maya Image Archive has been documented and digitized by members of the TWKM project.

With respect to the metadata scheme, the digitized images are presented as the entity type “Medium” which is related to a variety of other entities such as Person, Archaeological Site, Place, Collection or Holder. All entities have several properties and are represented in relation to one another via a graph-based structure. For detailed information about data and metadata go to: Help

Note:At the moment the images in our Maya Image Archive are not displayable via Internet Explorer. We ask you to have patience and use a different browser as long as the problem persists. Sorry for the inconvenience.